Chocolate Cake for Breakfast (25 page)

Uncle Simon met us at the edge of the lawn. ‘Welcome,’ he said solemnly, shaking Mark by the hand. ‘Merry Christmas. Good to see you again.’

‘Merry Christmas,’ said Mark.

‘Simon McNeil, mayor.’ Uncle Simon likes to be absolutely sure people realise who they’re speaking to. ‘Good of you to come today. Meeting all the relatives, eh? And how are you, Helen?’

‘Good, thank you,’ I said.

‘People are congregating on the patio. Come and say hello,’ he said, relieving Mark of the salad bowl and giving it to me. He led Mark around the side of the house, and I went meekly in the back door with my salad.

The kitchen was full of hurrying aunts. Aunty Laura, short and squat and wearing a silk tunic that looked like an expensive floral tent, was fossicking in a drawer for cutlery. ‘That’s your salad?’ she said briskly. ‘Put it on the table. Leave it covered for now and find a suitable serving spoon.’

I repressed the urge to salute and turned left into the dining room, where the table was already laden with a discouraging array of salads. Aunty Deb followed me in and hugged me. ‘Merry Christmas, love,’ she said.

‘Merry Christmas. Nice top.’

‘Thank you. A Christmas present from myself. Have you brought Mark with you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Uncle Simon mustered him round to the patio.’

‘Poor man,’ she said. ‘How’s the morning sickness?’

‘Still there.’

‘Is the ginger tea helping?’

‘A little bit,’ I said. It wasn’t – I had drunk it solidly for a week and gained only a deep aversion to ginger – but it seemed a shame to hurt her feelings.

From the kitchen came the sound of high-pitched bickering. ‘
I
want to carry it!’

‘You’re tipping it! Mum, Bel’s dropping sauce on the floor!’

‘Annabel,’ Em said wearily, ‘put it on the bench. Now.’

‘But
Mu-um
. . .’

Em must have taken the dish, because loud wails rent the air, followed by an almighty crash of metal on metal. Granny’s voice rose shrill above the uproar. ‘What’s all this?
What’s
all this?’

Even at her most amiable my grandmother’s voice couldn’t be described as dulcet, and when displeased she sounded just like the wicked witch in a pantomime. Aunty Deb and I looked at one another and giggled.

‘We could get out through the window,’ I suggested.

‘Wimp,’ she said, and led the way back into the kitchen.

The crash proved to have been a stack of baking trays, dislodged while rummaging for a platter. Granny was sitting squarely on her walker, blocking the outside door, and Bel was still roaring open-mouthed as Em mopped the tiles around her feet.

‘Helen,’ Bel sobbed, casting herself against me and burying her head in my skirt. My baby sister is not the girl to let the chance of a dramatic gesture pass her by.

‘You’re quite a stranger, Helen,’ Granny said.

This was true. Visiting my grandmother required both courage and resilience, and lately I’d had neither. ‘Merry Christmas, Granny,’ I said, patting Bel.

‘Got yourself in trouble, I hear.’

I had the sudden and unpleasant feeling that the ears of everyone in the room were straining in my direction. ‘Mm,’ I said.

‘Helen’s not in trouble, Granny,’ said Caitlin. ‘She’s a good girl.’

‘She is indeed,’ said Em, wrapping a protective arm around my shoulders.

Granny snorted.

Escaping outside, I made my way around the side of the house to the patio and found Uncle Peter talking to Mark. Uncle Peter once played a game of rugby for Waikato and would, we are told, have certainly been an All Black if not for the stupidity and lack of vision of that year’s selectors.

Sam, his sister Maree, Dad and Uncle Bruce (actually a first cousin once removed rather than a bona fide uncle) were grouped around the Water Feature. This was a new addition to the patio since I had last visited, a polished stone ball atop a metre-high concrete plinth, with a trickle of water spouting from its top and dribbling down the sides into a shallow bath at the bottom.

‘Apparently it cost two and a half thousand dollars,’ Sam was saying.

‘It makes me want to pee,’ Maree said. ‘Hey, Helen!’

‘Hi, guys,’ I said. ‘Merry Christmas.’

‘Ah,’ said Dad. ‘You would be the woman who gave her sister a tambourine for Christmas.’

‘She wanted a harmonica. You should be grateful.’

‘I’d be more grateful if I hadn’t been woken at six by someone banging a bloody tambourine two inches from my left ear.’

‘Sorry. How long has Uncle Peter been talking to Mark?’

‘About ten minutes,’ said Maree.

‘I’d better rescue him,’ I said.

‘How?’ she asked.

‘He’ll be alright,’ said Sam. ‘I’m sure he’s coped with worse.’

‘Lunchtime!’ called Caitlin, coming around the corner of the house. ‘Aunty Laura says you’ve all got to come now!’

‘So,’ Em hissed, spooning potato salad onto her plate, ‘what did Mark get you for Christmas?’

‘A book, some body lotion and four boxes of Cabin Bread,’ I said. The Broadview supermarket didn’t stock the large dry crackers, and they were perfect for giving an upset stomach something to do apart from trying to digest its own lining.

‘Oh.’ In Em’s opinion, lingerie, jewellery and perfume are the only valid gifts for a man to bestow on the woman in his life. Anything else means he doesn’t think she’s sexy.

‘It was just what I wanted!’ I protested, picking up a bread roll.

‘Annabel, there’s nothing green on your plate,’ said Aunty Laura, who was stationed at the head of the big table, serving slices of ham that appeared to have been cut with a microtome.

‘I don’t like salad,’ said Bel.

‘It’s good for you.’

Bel looked mutinous. ‘Daddy says salad isn’t food, it’s what food eats.’

‘Well, you need to eat this –’ she snared a leaf of fancy lettuce in her tongs, and dropped it on Bel’s plate ‘– before you can have pudding.’

‘But I don’t
like
–’ Bel started.

‘Annabel,’ said Em warningly. Then, in a low angry mutter, ‘Who does that woman think she is?’

After Uncle Simon’s lengthy Christmas grace I made it to Mark’s side for the first time since we had arrived.

‘How are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Fine.’ He looked at the bread roll in my hand. ‘Is that all you’re having?’

I nodded sadly.

‘Bummer,’ he said, smiling at me as he speared a lump of camembert with his fork.

‘Helen!’ Granny called from Uncle Simon’s big armchair. ‘Come here!’

I went, and Mark, poor innocent, put down his plate and came too. ‘So you’re the rugby player, are you?’ she asked, looking him up and down.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Can you do anything else?’

Mark looked somewhat nonplussed. ‘I can knit,’ he said after a moment’s thought.

Like Queen Victoria, Granny was not amused. ‘I dislike tattoos,’ she said, looking pointedly at his bare arm. ‘Very low class.’

‘Granny!’ I said.

‘I dare say he can take it,’ she said drily. ‘Looking forward to fatherhood, are you?’

There was a breathless, delighted hush as everyone within earshot fell silent, the better to hear Mark’s response. I used the time to tweak my Most Hated People list, moving Granny to first place ahead of both Joe Watkins and Fat Sharon. But Mark, who after years of media training and press conferences was very difficult to rattle, just looked at her evenly and said, ‘Of course.’

‘Humph,’ said Granny, and the phone in my shorts pocket began to ring.

23

NEVER, NOT EVEN IN THOSE FIRST FEW MONTHS POST
-graduation when after-hours calls were wildly exciting rather than a major drawback of the job, have I been more grateful for a call. ‘Hello?’ I said, opening the phone as I hastened out through the French doors.

‘Hi,’ replied a voice that didn’t, strangely, belong to Pauline. ‘I’ve got a really sick dog here that needs looking at.’

‘Oh. What’s the prob –?’ And then I realised who it was on the other end of the line and broke off, smiling.

‘I think it’s got a broken leg or something,’ said Sam.

Truly, the boy was a pearl among cousins. ‘I’ll be at the clinic in five minutes,’ I said warmly.

‘There you go. Don’t ever say I don’t do anything for you.’

‘You’re wonderful,’ I told him.

‘Yeah,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I know.’

‘Call?’ Mark asked as I came back in.

Aunty Deb was standing between us, so I only nodded. ‘Do you want to come, or would you rather not?’

‘I’ll come,’ he said.

‘You’ve not even had your lunch!’ said Aunty Deb. ‘At least eat something first.’

Mark broke open his bread roll, transferred a pile of ham shavings and a wedge of cheese into the split and closed it again. ‘Good to go,’ he said.

‘Let me put the rest in the fridge for you,’ she said, bustling forward to relieve him of his plate. ‘You can have it when you get back. Good luck!’

‘What is it?’ he asked as we crossed the lawn.

‘Nothing,’ I admitted. ‘It was Sam, rescuing us from Granny. Did you want to be rescued, or would you rather go back and finish lunch? I can easily say they’ve rung back and changed their minds.’

‘Nah, let’s go home,’ he said. He looked at his roll. ‘I think I’ve got all the best bits here anyway.’

We had barely reached the ute when the phone rang again. ‘A woman’s just called with a fitting dog,’ said Pauline. ‘Where are you?’

‘In town,’ I said.

‘Good. I told her to go straight to the clinic.’

‘Did you get her name?’ I asked, remembering my last fitting-dog call, when the owners hung up before Pauline could get any details and I waited in vain at the clinic for an hour in the dead of night, getting steadily colder and sourer.

‘Beryl Stewart,’ she said.

I stuffed the phone back into my pocket and dug frantically for the keys.

‘What is it?’ Mark asked.

‘Fitting dog,’ I said, wrenching the driver’s door open. ‘The owner’s a lovely old lady who just lost her husband.’

‘What makes dogs start fitting?’ he asked, reaching up and grasping the handle above his door as we swung left at the bottom of the hill.

‘Poison,’ I said. ‘Or epilepsy, or a brain tumour . . . Nothing good. She
loves
that dog. I did a house call there a few months ago, and she had her husband’s ashes in an urn on the mantelpiece, and she told me hers and Taffy’s are going to go in there too. She’s had it put specially into her will, because she doesn’t trust her son to do it.’

Beryl Stewart was waiting at the clinic, a fragile, silver-haired wisp of a woman in a powder-blue twinset and pearls. She was bent over the back seat of her car, but straightened as I tumbled out of the ute. ‘My dear,’ she said shakily, ‘I do apologise for spoiling your Christmas.’

‘Of course you haven’t,’ I said.

Taffy the Bichon Frisé was stretched out flat on the back seat of the car, every muscle in spasm and with her lips drawn back in a horrible fixed, grand-mal-seizure snarl. I bent and scooped the small shuddering body into my arms. ‘Could she have got into anything?’ I asked over my shoulder, running towards the back door.

‘I don’t know! I was out all morning with friends. I left Taffy inside, but she can get in and out of her little door whenever she needs to. I found her on the kitchen floor when I came in.’

I grappled with my keys and an armful of seizuring dog, and Mark twitched the key ring out of my hand. ‘It’s the big silver one,’ I told him. ‘Could she have left the section?’

‘No,’ said Mrs Stewart. ‘It’s completely fenced.’

‘Have you put down any slug bait in the veggie garden?’

‘I – I put some down yesterday, but she’s never touched it before.’

‘Alarm code?’ Mark asked.

‘Two-four-six-five-stay.’ I ran past him up the hall, dropped Taffy on the treatment room table and switched on the lights. ‘I need to sedate her, Mrs Stewart, so she’ll stop seizuring.’

The anaesthetic drugs were in a drawer under the table – they should have been locked in the safe at the end of every day, but neither Zoe nor I ever remembered to do it. I pulled up four mils of diazepam and reached for the clippers to shave the skin over the vein on Taffy’s foreleg.